


with the sun shining down over me and you

by emilybrontay



Category: Coronation Street
Genre: Babies, Broody Lesbians, F/F, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 14:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15775740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilybrontay/pseuds/emilybrontay
Summary: “The thing with lesbians,” Sinead says, pulling a lemonade ice lolly open with her teeth and handing it to Daniel, “is that you have to really plan a baby. Not like it were with us, where all I had to do was leave me pill at Auntie Beth’s two nights one week, and bosh, there’s our Jeanie! You have to, you know, put a lot of effort in.”Summer, in the not too distant future. Title is from Noah and the Whale's Five Years Time.





	with the sun shining down over me and you

**Author's Note:**

> This is really just incredibly self-indulgent baby stuff, because I love babies. Kate and Rana are going to be Daniel and Sinead's baby's cool aunts!  
> This is for Lisa - you absolute legend!! And for Char who I love with my whole heart!!!! Daniel and Sinead's baby's name is short for Jeanette, after notable Manchester writer Jeanette Winterson. And Jean Genie is a David Bowie song, which is pretty cool and I felt like fit Daniel and Sinead's vibe.

Jeanie is the fattest baby Kate has ever seen in her life. She’s all dimpled elbows and chubby cheeks. Kate thinks it’s funny, because Daniel’s paper thin, and there’s hardly anything to Sinead either.

Rana is obsessed with Jeanie’s double chin. They’re sprawled out on the grass at the Red Rec – Robert’s trying to barbecue burgers but he keeps getting distracted by Jack and Joseph’s water fight. Kate’s stretched out on the grass beside Rana, who is playing peekaboo with their goddaughter.

“Oh, look at her,” she coos, and Kate rolls onto an elbow to get a better view, “look at how her chin wobbles when she laughs! You’re the cutest baby in the world, Jean Genie!”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d been up all night with her screaming the house down,” Daniel says dryly from the bench. Kate cranes her neck to look at him – he’s reading some Hardy novel that she can’t quite make out the title of because the sun’s in her eyes.

“Oh, you love it,” Rana laughs, and pulls Jeanie’s hat down to shield her eyes, “Is it your teeth, Jean Genie? Is that what’s been bothering you?”

Jeanie laughs and claps her chubby fists together. She has been particularly slobbery today, Kate thinks. “How long’s teething supposed to last?” she asks, not sure who she’s expecting an answer from.

“Well I’m not a paediatric expert,” Rana says – Kate loves it when she starts talking like a nurse, once she was drunk and wouldn’t go to sleep until Rana had named all the bones in the hand, “but normally it’s about a year, year and a half. It’s a week for every tooth, I think.”

“Beth said Craig was born with all his teeth,” Daniel says, still not looking up from his book, “When she started teething, Sinead said she wished Jeanie had been too, although I personally am rather glad my daughter doesn’t resemble a creature from Mary Shelley’s imagination.”

“Where _is_ Sinead?” Rana asks, stretching out on the grass with Jeanie. The baby grabs fistfuls of Rana’s hair, and she laughs. Kate thinks it’s her favourite sound in the world.

“Buying ice lollies,” Daniel answers, “I imagine she’s still stuck in the queue for the ice cream van, the weather being like this.”

Kate sighs, and stretches out her legs. “It’s lovely,” she throws her head back, the sun shining right onto her face, “Almost like being back in Spain.”

“Or Italy,” Rana says, shuffling over so her head’s resting on Kate’s knees, and she’s got Jeanie balanced on her chest, “D’you remember that day in Rome where it was so hot it felt like the walls of the house were on fire?”

Kate remembers it vividly. They’d tried to sunbathe but it had been too hot for that, too hot to do anything. They lay on the floor by the air conditioner and watched Italian reality television, Rana’s head on Kate’s chest. “Mmm,” Kate adds, “or when we were in Greece, and we put ice in the pool.”

Rana laughs at the memory. “Or in Turkey, when-”

“Is there anywhere you two haven’t been?” Daniel asks, putting his book down. Kate laughs, and pats his knee good-naturedly.

“We were thinking America next,” she tells him, and then looks over at Rana, “What’d you reckon, babe?”

Rana pauses her game of peekaboo with Jeanie to consider this. “I’d love to go to New York,” she says, and Kate thinks _I’d love to take you there_ , “Ooh, or California. In the summer. We could get a van, do Route 66.”

Kate can see it, so clearly in her head. The two of them in a rickety rented truck, roof down, tunes on. Rana’s hand on the back of Kate’s neck. The empty diners, the ghostly motels.

“Ooh,” Rana exclaims, shaking Kate from her daydream, “We could take Jeanie, when she’s a bit older, to New York at Christmas. You’d like that, wouldn’t you Jean Genie?”

She kisses Jeanie’s chubby cheeks, and Kate glances up at Daniel, who is looking at her with a strange, knowing glint in his eye.

“Would you and Sinead be alright with that?” she asks. He shrugs.

“Probably. Depends how much of a handful she is when she gets older – if she’s anything like the rest of my family, you can have her for as long as you like from the age of ten onwards.”

He sits back on the bench, and Kate, bored with having a crick in her neck from talking to him, hops up so she’s sat beside him. He shields his eyes from the sun with his hand, and gazes around the park.

“I’m looking for Sinead,” he says, “I miss her.”

Kate catches Rana’s eye, and they both say _awwww_ at the exact same time. Daniel laughs.

“Alright, alright, I get it, I’m in love, it’s funny,” he slings an arm round Kate’s shoulders like he used to when they worked in the Bistro together and nothing seemed to go right for either of them. “You know,” he says to Kate in a quiet voice that Rana can’t hear, “your missus looks like she’d take my daughter home with her if nobody’d notice.”

Kate gives him a look.

“I’m just saying!” he protests, “I’ve been around enough women to know what broody looks like!”

Kate scoffs. “Can I just remind you that you’re _engaged to_ and have a _baby with_ the girl who took your _virginity_ , Mr Been Around Enough Women!”

“ _Several_ things happened between the virginity taking and the engagement,” he insists, “including, can I just remind _you_ , your _sister_.”

Kate groans. “I’d forgotten about that! Ugh!”

She mock-shudders, and he squeezes her shoulders. “C’mon,” he says, “you must’ve thought about it.”

Sometimes it’s all Kate _can_ think about. The other day, the Weatherfield Gazette’s anniversary page featured two women who’d been together _sixty_ years, they were _great grandmothers_ , and it had made Kate burst into tears in the Kabin. Something in her chest had ached when she stood at the font at Jeanie’s christening, watching Daniel, in his too small suit, pass the baby to Sinead. She’d thought it was because she was happy for him, her best mate, that he’d finally got what he wanted. But then she’d glanced at Rana, and she’d realised – Jeanie existed because Daniel and Sinead loved each other, and there was _magic_ in that. There was magic in the way they looked at each other when Jeanie fell asleep in Sinead’s arms in the Rovers back garden, there was magic in the way she heard them whisper to each other the nights she’d sat on their sofa with a bottle of wine and _Strictly Ballroom_. _I’ve just put her down. I’ll check on her – no it’s alright, I’ll go_.

She’d never understood it before, but she did now.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs, “I don’t – could you see it? With Sinead? When you looked at her, when you look at her, can you see the rest of your life? The Christmases and the holidays, the kids waking you up with burnt breakfast in bed on your birthday?”

He looks at her very seriously, in that earnest Daniel way of his. “Yeah,” he says, “I can’t see anything else.”

Kate watches Rana with Jeanie on her hip, laughing with Sophie.

“Can you?” Daniel asks, “When you look at Rana?”

She nods. She thinks she might start crying, which is ridiculous.

“Yeah,” she sighs.

“Well, there you go then.”

He says it like its simple, but it’s so – it feels so _big_ , to Kate, this ache in her chest. “How d’you – how did you say something like that? How can you -?”

He screws his face up like he’s thinking, and in the distance Kate spots Sinead, boxes of ice lollies in her arms, navigating her way through the crowds of picnickers. “With us,” Daniel begins, choosing his words carefully, “it was – messy, I think, we sort of got everything we wanted before we knew we wanted it and then – well, you know. And then it was just a given. We knew.”

“We knew what?” Sinead, half way up the path to the bench, calls up to them. When she reaches them, she leans down to kiss Daniel like it’s a reflex, like she’s not thinking about it. “I got a box of berry flavours and a box of – well, I think they’re like coke and lemonade and that but I’m not too sure. It were dead busy, the ice cream van, I nearly had a fight with this group of teenagers over these. So – what is it we knew?”

She sits herself between them, and rips the cardboard off the top of the box. Kate feels a bit like a kid again, like she’s twelve with knobbly knees and like she has to be home by seven. Sinead offers her a cola ice lolly.

“Kate wants to have babies with Rana,” Daniel says, his arm round Sinead’s waist. Kate pulls an indignant face and tries to give him a shove. He laughs.

“Give over! I never said that!”

“Oh, it’d be lovely if you did,” Sinead coos. “If they do,” she turns to Daniel, “can we have another one at the same time as them so they’d be in the same year at school?”

“We’re only just figuring out what to do with the one we’ve got!” Daniel laughs, but there’s something about the way he’s looking at her – there’s that ache again, Kate thinks as she looks for Rana. She finds her sat on a picnic blanket with Roy Cropper, bouncing Jeanie on her knees.

“Have you talked about it?” Sinead asks in earnest. Kate shrugs.

“Sort of. Vaguely. I don’t know – I didn’t really think it was for me, y’know, but seeing her with Jeanie…”

“The thing with lesbians,” Sinead says, pulling a lemonade ice lolly open with her teeth and handing it to Daniel, “is that you have to really plan a baby. Not like it were with us, where all I had to do was leave me pill at Auntie Beth’s two nights one week, and bosh, there’s our Jeanie! You have to, you know, put a lot of effort in.”

Kate laughs loudly, so loudly that Rana looks round from her spot on the other side of the park. She waves Jeanie’s chubby fist for her, and Kate waves back.

“Uh, I resent the idea that I did not put a lot of effort into Jeanie’s conception,” Daniel says, and Sinead laughs, kisses him lightly.

“You know what I mean,” she says, and then she turns to Kate, “ _you_ know what I mean, don’t you, Kate?”

Kate is watching Rana cross the Rec with Jeanie on her hip. She doesn’t believe in God, but she believes in this – the butterflies in her stomach, even though she’s seen Rana thousands of times before, and the contentment that sits in her bones. Rana’s coming over to _me_ , she thinks. Sure, she’s also delivering Jeanie back to her parents, but she’s smiling at _me_ like that. We’re only ever going to each other.

Daniel takes Jeanie from Rana almost immediately, blowing raspberries on her cheeks and wiping her slobbery, ice cream covered face with a handkerchief. Kate is dimly aware of Sinead clucking about Jeanie’s teeth, rooting around in the nappy bag for a tube of baby Bonjela. She’s more aware, however, of Rana gently sitting beside her. There’s an air of nervousness about her, although that could just be Kate projecting.

“Alright?” Rana says, “What’re you lot chatting about then?”

“Oh, nothing,” Kate says, but Sinead, still rummaging in the bag, interrupts her.

“Kate’s dead broody,” she says, and Kate elbows her.

“I am _not_!”

“It’s alright,” Rana starts to say, and Kate grabs her hand.

“What I mean is,” she says, and Sinead’s tactfully turned her back on them, applying Bonjela to Jeanie whilst Daniel bounces her on his knee, “what I meant- what I mean, is…that this is it. You know? We’re it. _You’re_ it. I don’t know if that makes sense, but – well, y’know. You know, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Rana smiles, “I know.”


End file.
